Features » Lifestyle

22/12/2005

Not heaven, but not hell either

Roger Boyes travels through KaDeWe in Berlin, Europe's poshest department store, in search of the true German Christmas

Christmas is hell. It is ten o'clock at Germany's leading department
store and already the piped music is playing the perverse seasonal
anthem: the Band Aid song "Do they know it's Christmas?" Each overheated
store level has its own torture corner, every customer is punished in
his own way for sins committed earlier in the year. There is no
mistaking the discomfort on the face of a man â his head shaven as
smooth as a billiard ball â trying to communicate the scent of his
neglected wife to a patient, silent saleswoman in the perfume
department. She coolly watches his pantomime; a man who cannot remember
the smell of his partner deserves to struggle. "Er, it is flowery,
sweet, she loves it...shit, if only I could remember the name." â "Why
don't you go back home and ask her what you bought last year?" suggests
the saleswoman, with just a hint of irony.

Elsewhere,
on the toys floor, an elderly woman is reprimanding an irritated mother who has
just shouted at her irritating daughter; three generations on the
fourth floor of KaDeWe bound by the frustration of the season. It is
men who crumple first. Department stores are not designed for men.
"Look, just wait here!, snaps a determined matron who marches like a
gendarme into the crowd, a swirling chaos of elbows and halitosis. Her
husband sinks with a sigh, a low whistle like a punctured tyre, onto
one of the three leather seats near the escalator. Other men simulate
an interest in shoes â "Try those, darling!" â in order to find a seat.
There are always chairs in Shoes.

This is, by a most modern
definition, an austerity Christmas. Not as difficult as the 1950s,
obviously. Yet, more complex. Germany has never before had such a wide
array of choice. Christmas, as a consumer ritual, has become a
globalised event. The shelves are as full as Asian mimicry car
showrooms: German taste has been carefully studied by the Chinese who
can produce an almost-perfect, but cheaper simulacrum of the German
Christmas experience. And so, in order to celebrate in an authentically
German way, one has to pay more. This is not a hysterical stampede for
luxury products, merely a search for authenticity, for the real German
Christmas.

Berlin's KaDeWe flourishes in this strange, strained
climate, just as Harrod's in London has become one of the few places on
earth where one can buy a true English Christmas pudding (the
alternative, to cook the pudding oneself, is seen as a ridiculous idea
by the metropolitan middle class). And so, Christmas in Germany
becomes a schizoid holiday, a festival for those with money, in search
of a celebration that resembles as closely as possible the Christmas of
previous generations, and a festival for those without money, who have
to improvise their happiness. There are 560,000 Berliners on Germany's revamped unemployment and social welfare programme Hartz IV:
more than half a million who cannot dream of being able to afford the
latest must-have in the perfume department, "Breath in Berlin". It
comes in a bottle shaped like the Alex, the television tower, and cost
49 euros.

There really is a consumer slump in Germany. According
to a survey by the consulting company Deloitte, the personal budget for
presents is decreasing this year by 9 per cent compared to 2004. The
winter heating bill will be huge, dismissals are planned in Volkswagen,
Siemens and other companies; the Christmas bonus has been reduced or
abolished. The scramble is on for presents that are worth the
investment. Less money, more stress. KaDeWe, Europe's most luxurious
department store, is not immune from this struggle: hence the
purgatorical Saturdays.

But it is concerned with another
dilemma: more money, less time, more stress. "Yesterday a man came
humping in, pointed at a Christmas pyramid, and said 'I'll take it',"
says Hartmut Decker, decoration specialist at KaDeWe. "It cost two
thousand euros. Obviously he didn't have much time." We look at each
other, baffled. How could any Christmas pyramid be worth that kind of
money? And yet, as the six floors of the shop come to seem like a
compressed version of Dante's nine levels of hell, you begin to
understand. Nobody really wants to be here; Christmas is elsewhere and
if 2000 euros is burning a hole in your pocket, if it offers a quick
exit, then seize your chance, carpe diem.

Only Santa Claus with
his purple Napoleonic hat seems to be half-way happy. Sitting on his
red throne under the artificial Christmas tree, his smile is genuine,
his cheeks apple-red without the addition of rouge. He gives his name
as Peter von Christmas, and is a former model for Jean Paul Gaultier.
As an actor he could be last seen, some way behind Brad Pitt, in the
sandal-and-toga film Troy. "I was a bad guy, chopping off heads." Now,
for the seventh year in a row, he is the symbol of Berlin's commercial
Christmas. But even he is feeling the strain. "Santa Claus needs to go
pee, too."

A department store is a capitalist machine designed
to persuade people to spend money. It is the most sensitive barometer
of the popular mood. Every evening, every week an assessment is made:
what is selling, what is gathering dust? Trade means change. Since it
was founded in 1907 by Adolf Jahndorf it has constantly adapted, found
ways of making profits in the years of hyperinflation, the years of
war, reconstruction and reunification. It grows organically,
irrespective of whether Berlin is booming or teetering on the brink of
bankruptcy.

KaDeWe on its opening in 1907 and reconstructed after war damage in 1956

In 1943 it was almost entirely destroyed when an
American plane crashed into the building. By 1950 it had rebuilt the
first two levels: the new beginning. By 1978 it had a selling space of
44,000 square metres. When Germany expanded, so did KaDeWe and it now
claims around 60,000 square metres: second only to Harrod's in London.
It is reasonable then to see the shop as more than a shop. Rather, as a
model of Germany as it would like to be seen. The shop was called
Kaufhaus des Westens (department store of the West) long before the
"west" became an ideological category. It was, in the eyes of Berliners
at least, a civilizational measuring stick: How much spending, how much
luxury can a society tolerate? At what point does choice â hundreds
of kinds of sausages â become decadent?

KaDeWe does not have an
in-house intellectual. It has bakers, tailors and detectives but no
theologists or philosophers or poets. It does however have tradition
and its most articulate salespeople are interpreters of this tradition:
they understand the fine balance between wealth and poverty, between
German products and international competition. The big old
department stores â the KaDeWe in Berlin, Harrod's in London, Lafayette
in Paris â have a responsibility not only to the customer and the chief
accountant but also to a lost world of service, diligence and quality.
The secondary values find a home here rather than in the barrackroom or
classroom. This goes beyond the exchange of cash. The Saturday crowds
may look as if they are racing for the lifeboats of a sinking cruise
liner but they are in fact looking for more, a sense of solidarity, a
necessary part of their German identity.

And so, where better to
investigate the German ability to celebrate? Christmas is about the
pursuit of childhood memory, about a feeling of intactness. Every shop
in the capitalist universe seeks to press the appropriate button. The
hot toy of the season is the Roboraptor, an evolutionary development of
the plastic dinosaurs that earlier generations used to play with in the
back of the family Opel. It can be programmed, it roars, it twists its
head with menace. It costs 149 euros and it is pointless, over-marketed
junk. The simple sentimental truth though is that for many parents the
price is worth paying to make a child smile or quiver with excitement
if that smile touches a memory of a happy Christmas a generation or two
ago.

Department stores understand that for Germans, Christmas
comes through the nose, the mouth, the touch, the eyes and sometimes
the ears. "Orange and cinnamon," says Hartmut Decker, "that's what we
wanted to put in the shop windows." The scent of Christmas was supposed
to radiate out of the windows onto the street, a kind of Loreley for
the nostrils. It did not work in the end; either too little of the
scent came out, or too much. Next year perhaps. In the meantime, the
shop is depending on the Berger lamp. Invented by a French pharmacist
in the 19th century, these scented candles are supposed to destroy
smells and influence morals: killing and seducing, the classic French
duo.

So many scents have merged in the perfume department, in
one giant olefactory stew, that not even its head, Frau Renate
Engelmann, can really give it a clear identity. All that emerges is
that Christmas is a time for lovers to conceal their identity and
become in their own flickering imagination, a celebrity. It is
difficult not to blame RTL. There is a Paris Hilton scent for those who
want to smell like the woman who slept with Rick Salomon, Nick Carter
and Paris Latzis. There is a David Beckham scent for those who want
camouflage the hot sweat that comes from playing on a football field for
90 minutes and the cold sweat that comes from being discovered in the
middle of a passionate affair by one's long-suffering, cosmetically
enhanced ex-Spice-Girl wife. Both perfumes are, sadly, selling well.

In
search of Germany's most expensive scent, one wades through the slowly
ambling masses towards La Prairie. Apparently the company is selling a
perfume for 2,000 euros a bottle, the price of a second-hand Golf parked
rather despairingly in the Passauer Straße near one of KaDeWe's side
entrances. Two bottles would buy one minor cosmetic surgery, a face
lift or even a new nose. There is no chance to ponder the topsy-turvy
standards of luxury-economics because as one approaches the Prairie
stand one sees a woman, as out of place in the crowd as a Wagnerian at
a Robbie Williams concert. She is clutching a red cashmere jumper which
she brings up to her face again and again. The customer has a long
acquiline nose in an almond shaped face. The jumper, she explains to a
shop assistant, belonged to her father, who died two years ago, shortly
before Christmas 2003, his present unopened. The jumper still smells of
his perfume, the scent is fading, she wants to buy it: her father, so
to speak, in a bottle; her lost Christmas retrieved. The shop assistant
looks, ineffably sad, sadder than the bereaved daughter. She shakes her
head, twice, three times: there is nothing left, not a hint. The
daughter's eyes glaze over and she moves on, jumper in hand.

There
are traditional scents on sale which might just summon up ghosts:
Knize, for example, an Austrian man's scent made originally in the
Czech lands in 1858. It is a Habsburg cologne and sits tucked away on
the shelves, like an obscure volume of poetry in a bookshop. The
daughter was not looking for Knize or any of the gruffly masculine
English perfumes, but a missing part of herself.

Chocolate has
become the governing smell, the secret code of childhood Christmases.
It is secular, almost pagan. The film Chocolat, starring the
(delicious) Juliette Binoche, demonstrated the power of the perfume
chocolate. A chocolate boutique is opened directly opposite the church
and the priest identifies the shop-owner as a danger to his flock:
chocolate challenges any Christian commitment to self-denial.
Naturally, the chocolate department â with its addictive pungency
butter, sugar and cocoa â is the pagan heart of KaDeWe. It is what
sucks the shopper up to the turmoil of the 6th floor gourmet department
and brings him (or more usually, her) to a heightened awareness that
Christmas enters the German primarily through a combination of nose and
mouth. The other senses are not insignificant, but they are secondary.

"We
used to eat just sausages and potato salad on Christmas Eve," says the
customer Gertrud Bender, who at 64 can still recite whole
meals, course by course, that she remembers from the 1950s. "There
wasn't much money for food but that wasn't really the point â we wanted
to give Mutti a rest." Sausages and potato salad remains a family
tradition in many a household â KaDeWe offers 1,200 kinds of sausages so the
menu does not have to be completely monotone. Sausage or no sausage â if
Mutti is rich enough she does not have to lift a finger. "For Christmas
we offer a house platter," says Norbert Könnecke, "we also have a
lobster platter, a game platter, a fish platter. In total, we are
sending out more than 1,000 platters on Christmas Eve. House delivery
with our 17 cars." It is difficult to imagine: darkness falls over
Berlin, the children grow nervous, the last adjustments are made to the Christmas tree, and suddenly the door bell rings.
Christmas dinner by KaDeWe truck.

Norbert Könnecke, head of the
gourmet empire with 500 workers, does not reveal whether he
approves or disapproves of this trend. He comes from a food-loving
background â "I took my job training in a small specialist store in
Nassau, they roasted their coffee beans, milk was poured into
containers, the cream cheese was homemade." Yet the 57 year old is a
model of discretion, dressed in pinstripes like a manager from Vicki
Baum's Grand Hotel, but with the manner of a ambassador running an
embassy accredited to the Republic of Food. He does not judge, does not
wince at the fact that the bestselling product is a jar of mustard
shaped like a bear (12,000 sold this year). Still, a man whose life has
been so dedicated to good food must surely regret the slow death of
cooking in the middle classes. The space dedicated to food expands year
by year but not as fast as the space dedicated to restaurants: 33 food
stands with over 1000 seats. There are champagne bars, Veuve Cliquot
and Moet, an oyster bar, sushi rolled by a sushi-master. The clientele
is part of the Berlin kaleidoscope: a sprinkling of minor aristocrats,
a luxury car salesman who says he has to have two glasses of Moet a day
because of his blood pressure ("You don't believe me? Look, I show you
my doctor's note!") a lawyer, men (mainly men) escaping wives and
offices.

One senses the dismay of the gourmet management, the
High Priests of the temple of gobbling: if one takes the trouble of
training staff to be able to describe exotic fruit, to give lectures on
ostrich eggs, then one wants food to be taken seriously rather than
treated as a backdrop to a social rendezvous. But not a word escapes
their pursed lips.

Food is a dynamic process. There is a new
preference for less-fatty food in the German diet and a genuine,
somehow paranoid curiosity about the origins of food. Geese, duck and
turkey remain the Christmas bird of choice. "But there is a clear trend
against frozen food," says Herr Könnecke and at last, you sense his
support. "Instead people spend their money on fresh animals, they
prefer animals that were kept naturally, that were fed healthy food,
that ran around freely â best of all they would like to know the name of
the farmer and the map reference of the field."

KaDeWe offers
some kind of reassurance. Customers pay not just for good quality meat
but for psychological support, the idea that money buys safety. This
idea, rooted in the 1950s and the economic miracle years, remains one of
the most powerful illusions of German politics. So you come to a
department store like KaDeWe not just because of the vast, and frankly
ostentatious choice (300 kinds of whiskey, 60 kinds of French bread
etc. ad nauseam), but because it is a world protected by cash. The
chance of being food-poisoned in KaDeWe must be close to zero; too much
is invested in buying fresh food, controlling it, spotting signs of
decay. Can it however protect the German Christmas?

The smell of
chocolate at the hubs of the gourmet level is misleading: the shop has
in fact banished most other food smells. Some smells cannot be avoided
â smoked fish, for example â but the many hundreds of cheeses are
carefully kept under wraps. They are not laid on straw and allowed to
breathe, in the French tradition. Naturally you can ask to smell the
white truffles from Alba, the black winter truffles from Perigord; the
out-of-season strawberries and the Camembert. But the smells are not
allowed to jump out at you, attack your senses. The Germans have come
to prefer hygiene over the raw sensuality of smell and taste. Why
should we expect otherwise? Why should a society so averse to risk want
to eat a piece of cheese with mould, even though that mould enhances
taste? The German Christmas has become more sterile than four decades
ago; the kitchens more scrubbed.

Certainly if you follow Volodya
K. around the food departments, you sense that it is possible to
celebrate differently. He is putting together the ingredients of a
Ukrainian Christmas dinner. KaDeWe understood quickly that there is a
big Russian spending power in Berlin. As in the boutiques around
Olivaer Platz, there is a ready demand for Russian-speaking staff. The
designer clothes branch has become used to the sight on Mondays of
mothers and daughters just arrived from Saint Petersburg, buying
handbags in bulk. But there are also big native Russian, Ukrainian and
Polish communities in Berlin and so KaDeWe has made itself the largest
supplier of carp. "Look at them," says Volodya who runs an
import-export business, "how I love their greedy eyes." He is talking,
of course, of the dead fish. "If their eyes are shining and glistening
it means they are truly fresh." The other ingredients of a Slav
Christmas are also easily tracked down: the pierogi, the essence of
barszcz. Volodya prefers to buy his carp live, keep them in a bath and
kill them himself; he prefers to peel the beetroot himself, to roll the
pierogi. "My house become a place of occupation, invaded by the forces
of Christmas and New Year." He sighs, in anticipation of the battle.
"It is messy but warm, the family swears and complains but that's how
it should be - Christmas is a process."

Bite by bite, sip by sip,
the German Christmas has surrendered its German-ness. Tastes have
become more adventurous â providing, of course, that "German standards"
are applied to the imported foodstuffs. Geese and duck from Poland have
been a fixed part of Christmas since at least the 1920s; the wine is
most likely to be French. Twelve thousand bottles of champagne are sold
by KaDeWe ahead of Christmas and New Year. "We have half a dozen
bottles of 1907 Heidsieck Monopol champagne," says Herr Könnecke, "this
champagne was on its way to the Czar in Saint Petersburg, the ship sank
and was not raised until over 90 years later. Against all beliefs, it
was still intact." The seawater preserved it. A bottle costs over 4,000
euros. Four have been sold during this austerity-Christmas.

"Feel
this," says Herr Bernd Metzler, head of the toy department. The stones
are smooth, heavy, perfect not only for creative children with
murderous instincts but also for grown-up architects â one blow with a
brick in a kindergarten dispute would certainly settle matters quickly.
The bricks are made in Rudolstadt in Thuringia, one of the few east
German toy manufacturers to survive the fall of the Berlin Wall. If there were such an
organisation as Rent-a-Grandfather, Herr Metzler would be its chairman;
he has a rugged, red face â more sailor than salesman â and a passion
for toys. Over the decades he has seen the German toy industry wither
away but also discover ways of defending itself against the Chinese. Of
all the heads of department in this store, he is perhaps the closest to
being a moral guardian, a defender of children, of innocence but also
of German craftmanship.

You have to look hard to find a
military toy â a machine gun say or a cowboy pistol â on the 4th floor
of KaDeWe. There are model soldiers, the successors of the Elastolin
figures that children played with in the 1950s. Now, as then, some of
the soldiers are Wehrmacht. "We decided to stock only the military
music band," he stresses. Deep down in the glass showcase, so deep that
you virtually have to lie on the floor, there is a figure of Erwin
Rommel, Desert Fox, with his Africa Corps car: it is harmless enough
but symptomatic of Herr Metzler's desire to shield the young of
Germany. The computer consoles are not switched on until after school
has ended and the games installed are for the age group 0-6 years: all
measures to stop children playing truant and killing time in Metzler's
department.

KaDeWe stocks both purely made German products and
the competition that is partly made in Asia: the plastic doll's house
and the wooden. The difference, Herr Metzler says, is touch: the
smoothness of finish, the roundness and solidity of Margaret
Ostheimer's farmyards. "The products are waxed, not artificially
modified, and that comes at a price, naturally." the trick is to
identify the "conscious parents". He means presumably a parent who can
tell the difference between plastic and wood, and who is willing to pay
the price. Not that all plastic is bad or, shall we say, un-German.
"Many companies are nowadays dislocating to the Eastern Block, not
least because of the logistics," says Herr Metzler, using a quaintly
outdated phrase. "Playmobil, however, remains in German hands, both as
producer and supplier." Playmobil pirate ships have been a fixed part
of the German play room for thirty years.

There have been
happy and sad moments in the toy business. Happy, when the Monchichi
was the fastest-moving toy: an ugly little monkey which, 13 years ago,
was selling at 19,99 DM. "People would come to me and say: I'll pay you
2 DM extra if you organize one for me. The Monchichis arrived at our
store and were gone the same moment â those times are over." Sad,
bitter-sweet, was when "GDR citizens came to us after the fall of the
Wall and brought us boxes full of Viking cars which they wanted to
sell." He had to explain: "We don't do this kind of thing."

Christmas
in Germany is supposed, is it not, to be about choral singing? Silent
Night? Bach? British shopping malls are full at this time of year with
carol singers, schoolchildren and their teachers belting out the
familiar songs (Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer) and rattling charity
tins. The normal response is to take evasive action, dive into a pub or
a boutique: the singing is usually aggressively mediocre. But at least
there is a specific Christmas sound. Germany, it seems, has been
running away from its vocal traditions. Only in a handful of churches â
in God-less Berlin at least â is there the chance of catching a fine
Christmas song. Even the music department on the fourth floor of KaDeWe
is as silent as a fish tank. There are a few earphones but no one seems
to be playing the limited range: "Zauber der Weihnacht" with Stefan Mross
and Stefanie Hertel. And Wham's "Last Christmas" from the days when
George Michael still liked women. Bing Crosby, of course.

"Do you play O Tannenbaum at home?The
girl, perhaps 23, pierced nose, bright blue mascara, looks surprised.
She hs been rifling through the independent section; since it is 11
o'clock in the morning, and this is Berlin, chances are that she is a
Hartz IV recipient."I mean, do you sit around the piano and sing on Christmas Eve?""I'm spending Christmas with my boyfriend.""But your mum and dad ...""They are divorced.""Maybe your grandmother, didn't she ever - ?"

The
muffling of German ears seems to be the biggest break with the past;
family-music at home has become an eccentric activity. Society has
become too atomised, tastes too divergent for generations to agree on a
shared way of musically articulating Christmas. The thesis that
Christmas in Germany has become an entirely sensory experience, a brief
moment when all the physical senses open up in an attempt to recover
the memory of a Christmas past, that thesis does not quite hold up.
Germans smell Christmas, they eat it and touch it â but they rarely use
their ears and this goes some way towards explaining the curious
flatness of celebrations, the reluctance of anyone over the age of 14
to get truly excited.

"The Germans are very conservative in the
way they celebrate," says Herr Decker, "they would prefer everything to
be red and green." Indeed in the small forest of artificial trees on
the ground floor, it is the red and green, rather than the purple and
the pastels that persuades customers to get out their digital cameras.
This year Harrod's shop windows has dummies dressed as transvestites,
in stockings and suspenders, shrill and intent on making passers-by
stare. "Unthinkable here," says Herr Decker, "Christmas has to look
like Christmas."

Yet within these narrow boundaries of taste,
it is possible to innovate, to make an interesting colour statement
about the festival. The reason is that the Germans â like the Swedes,
the Danes and other Northern Europeans â understand that the roots of
Christmas are pre-Christian and have to do with the creation and
celebration of light. Britons make a pilgrimage to the Ku'Damm because
it is better lit nowadays â thanks to the sponsorship of
king-of-the-loo Hans Wall â than Regent Street or Oxford Street.

The
sparkle somehow translates, in the jumbled psychology of the consumer,
into an appetite for jewellery. No other European country buys so much
jewellery, so much gold, to put underneath the Christmas tree. Partly,
this is because of the long-observed phenomenon that the relatively
rich males have relatively little imagination. Frau Claudia Gruber,
head of the Watches and Jewellery department, tacitly confirms this to
be the case. "Every Christmas, the men sit in front of me and say: "I
want to add to the collection." A curious phrase.

Frau
Gruber
maintains a computerized data bank with the details of her regular
customers. If a wife or a mistress received a bracelet for her
birthday, the very discreet Frau Gruber will know. She also knows what
jewellery would match. Just as children built up their Lego collection,
so male lovers, married or not, add to the jewellery case. It usually
works like this: women, in late October or November, start to make
reconnaissance missions to Frau Gruber. They try on, perhaps, an
exquisite
15,000 euro Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso. The watch has a double face:
practical and large numbered for the day; elegantly under-stated for
evening wear. The woman has often done her basic research before â "70
per cent are very well informed when they get here" â and wants merely
to feel the weight of the watch, to study it in the mirror.

At
home magazines are found that advertise the watch. With varying degrees
of subtlety â by the Third Advent weekend, the subtlety is admittedly
wearing thin â the man is pointed in the direction of the target. On
one Saturday morning, at breakneck speed he spends the 15,000 euros.
"Male customers do not like to waste time, for them that's the most
precious thing," says Frau Gruber who of all the senior staff in
KaDeWe seems to have the surest grasp of the psychology of her clients.
Later the man may lean back in his car seat and say: oh my God, what
have I done, 15,000 euros spent in ten minutes. Even the very rich are
vulnerable to such moments. But Frau Gruber knows the truth: that the
man's 10 minute purchase is actually the culmination of two months of opinion shaping.

The shop will organize for example
a four course dinner for forty regular customers â that is 20 couples.
During the break between courses, models move between the tables
showing off the latest rings and necklaces, the baubles hang from them
as surely as from a Christmas tree. It would take a particular form of
male stubbornness to resist a jewellery request that is framed during
such a dinner. The eye is captured; the brain follows.

Frau
Gruber who has worked her way up through the shop â unlike many of her
colleagues she is not a trained watch maker â wears a KaDeWe diamond
ring, a Piaget ring, a gold necklace from Bunz, gold earrings but as
far as one can see no gold ankle chain. She is, she says, "infected by
the jewellery virus." There is an almost maternal feel about the way
that she lays out a blue Vacheron watch studded with diamonds and
sapphires. She would, one feels, not be very happy if it were sold.
Since it costs 93,000 euros, her secret wish may be granted for a
while.

What marks out Frau Gruber, Herr Metzler and Herr
Könnecke is that they so roundly defy the clichés about German service
culture. There is an almost passionate relationship between the seller
and the product. The flicker behind Frau Gruber's spectacles when she
talks of the Vacheron matches the flicker behind Herr Könnecke's
glasses when he talks of his favourite wine. It is a slightly
unhealthy, certainly un-Prussian, commitment to craftsmanship, to the
beauty of things. They are not sales people in the normally accepted
sense since the customer, though essential to their lives, is not king
but rather part of a complex equation. To enter Frau Gruber's customer
data bank is to be admitted to a kind of secret fraternity bonded by a
love of quality. This is no longer a purely commercial transaction. It
is a celebration of the eye.

The saying goes: all that glitters
is not gold. Christmas shines and glitters in Germany, it catches the
eye, but it can also deceive. The former police man who wants to be
called Herr Müller, knows all about this: he heads the force of
detectives that patrol the sales floors. A department store lays out
its products in deliberately seductive ways: you want to eat its food,
sleep on his beds, curl up in front of its wide-screen televisions.
Since this particular department store also helps define the nature of
the German Christmas, it also extends a form of invitation to its
customers and visitors, lets them believe they are guests. But what if
that message is somehow confused? What if the customer is so dazzled by
what he sees that he fells compelled to put it in his pocket and walk
out of the shop? Herr Müller is there to stop him and, in so doing, to
bring a sense of reality back to KaDeWe: Christmas really is about
money, after all. "Of course, if our cameras pick up somebody drinking
from a can that he hasn't paid for, or opening a packet of cookies,
eating half of it, then putting it back, we don't always prosecute. I
mean, we have a heart too. We pull him in, we ban them from the shop,
and that's the end of the story."

Herr Müller is dressed
smartly casual: a tweed jacket, a jumper. Only his shoes, brightly
polished, give him away: they have the shine of a former soldier or a
former policeman. The spontaneous thief â "Lieschen Meier who puts a
bra in her pocket" â is becoming less significant, even before Hartz
IV, even in the days before Christmas. "We have more problems with
gangs who are steered from abroad." They are professionals, buying a
small shop in Poland so that they can order clothes tag removers.
Then, moving into the textile department, picking up a handful of
expensive clothes, taking them to the dressing cabin, removing the
clothes tags, putting them on underneath their normal clothing and
leaving the store.

There are no cameras in the dressing
cabins: KaDeWe is blind. The cameras are at the entrance area and the
security men in the monitoring room try to count how many dresses and
jacket are being taken inside the cabin. Technically, store security is
an interplay between the cameras â Herr Müller won't say how many there
are â and the detectives on the floor. "In theory we could stop someone
as soon as the camera shows him putting something in his pocket but we
prefer to wait until he is out of the shop. That sometimes means
following him for an hour or two." On an Advent Saturday that can be
particularly difficult. Those are, as we know, the moments when Hell
breaks loose.

Or maybe not. During the research for this
article, it was easy to stumble into the cliché of the "consumer
temple". Once, we accompanied a regular customer from the KaDeWe oyster
bar â well off, talkative, time on his hands â out on to the
Tauentzienstraße. He needed, for a change, to leave the building. On
the corner of the street, facing KaDeWe, a beggar was on her knees.
Spread out in front of her was a picture of Mother Theresa of Calcutta
and a tape recorder played religious music. She held a piece of
cardboard announcing that she had diabetes. Her face was red with cold,
rather than hot wine. "Diabetes?" said the man, "is easy to cure
nowadays." one could finish a Christmas report like that and it would
not be dishonest: there are rich and poor people in Germany and they
have still not found a common language.

Yet the interplay
between KaDeWe and the street outside, between a haven for the rich and
a Germany that is beginning to feel poor, is more complex. KaDeWe is a
German institution, but one that is more sensitive than most to the
public mood and the public taste. Since it focuses on quality (rather
than luxury), its employees have a kind of rugged honesty about them.
Is it good enough to sell? is a question you hear sometimes in the
shop's various departments but rarely, if ever, in the Germany that
lies outside the Tauentzienstraße. The people inside are not
anti-capitalists, but they understand the limits of capitalism. Through
their big smeared windows they can see how Germany is changing; what is
decaying, what is flourishing.

Not heaven, but not hell
either. Even Peter, KaDeWe's Santa Claus, has his feet (decked out in
over-warm boots) firmly on the ground. When the children approach him,
and his bored-looking angel in a red ballet dress, they present their
extravagant Christmas dreams: Play stations and Roboraptors. Peter
pulls on his long grey moustache and says in his Hanseatic baritone:
"Well, my dear, if you behave well! Then we'll see!" Never make false
promises, he says later, neither to children nor to adults. It is a
special kind of Christmas, this 2005: less magical perhaps, but more
clear-sighted.